Hello to everyone here in the room with us in New York, and to all of you that are tuned into the webcast. Welcome to part one of V.F.'s two-part fiscal 2025 investor event, Reinvent to Grow. Over the next couple of hours, you will hear from some of our global leaders who will collectively unveil the key pillars of our strategy. I couldn't be more excited to be here with you today, and I'm honored to share the stage with this world-class team. It's a little over two years since the last V.F. investor event. In fact, Martino and I are the only two who were here then on this stage and are here with you today. However, it's a new day. Before we get started, I do have some housekeeping items to take care of.
We will host a Q&A session at the end of today's presentations, so please hold your questions until that time. Our presenters will be making forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from the statements that are made today. Additional information regarding risks and uncertainties that could influence our results can be found in documents filed regularly with the SEC. Unless otherwise noted, amounts referred to today will be on a continuing operations and adjusted basis. Reconciliations of GAAP measures to adjusted amounts can be found in the appendix of the presentation, which identify and quantify all excluded items and provide management's view of why this information is useful to investors. Again, thank you for your interest in V.F. and for tuning in to our Fiscal 2025 Investor Day part one.
With that, I will now hand over to Bracken to get us started. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Chief Executive Officer, Bracken Darrell.
Let me add my welcome to our Investor Day. I've done about a dozen of these through the last, you know, last number of years, but this one's really special. It reminds me of my first turnaround, Old Spice, when I was 29 years old. And it also reminds me of the last one at Logitech, just before I joined V.F. One of the most useful lessons I learned early was to never engage in a turnaround with only a turnaround in mind. Turnarounds are just a step, just the very first step toward building a long-term sustainable growth machine. Some of you might have noticed how confident I seem to be about V.F. Those out there, and there are some who know me well, know I don't like to overpromise. So where does this confidence come from?
I think it's because I know three things you can't fully know yet, and we'll try to communicate a little bit more of those today. First, I have a significant amount of firsthand operator experience with turnarounds and with their transition to long-term growth. I know what it feels like in the beginning, when it seems the darkest. I know the feeling when the situation's starting to improve, even when there doesn't seem to be much evidence. I know when the products are getting better, but only in the pre-market phases. I've often seen and recognized when a team starts to march confidently to higher terrain, even while to outsiders, the company still seems mired in a marsh of decline. Human intuition is exceptional, and it's informed by experience. My career-long experience has honed my intuition about turnarounds. In my first turnaround, Old Spice, I was not so confident.
I changed so much: pricing, product, marketing, branding, promotion practices, and more. My boss believed in me even more than I believed in myself, and she supported me. Susan Arnold, maybe she'll listen to this one day. We got it right. We tripled market share in two years, and it became one of the most successful turnarounds in P&G history. Years later, after many successive experiences, I'm confident here, fully aware that all turnarounds are indeed a little different, but they have most of the same features. I don't expect you to make investments based on my confidence, but at least you know I'm pouring 30 years of experience-educated intuition into V.F. Now, let's move beyond my intuition. The second reason I'm so confident comes from knowable information. I know the team at the top of the organization now and how incredibly talented and increasingly synchronized they are.
You'll get exposed to more of them today and in our later Investor Day. In a little bit, our Chief People Officer will also help you understand how our shared vision for the talent engine this place will become is so exciting. My third source of confidence also comes from knowable information. I know what we're doing inside V.F. to make this happen right now. It's comprehensive. It's granular. It requires detailed execution and synchronization. It's all in our control, and it's going to be effective. We'll give you a glimpse today at these actions across the enterprise to drive improvement in gross margin and SG&A while setting the stage for return to growth. Back when I joined Logitech, one of the first analyst notes was titled, "Dishwasher Guy Takes Over Tech Company." I obviously came from outside the tech industry then. Logitech sales were falling.
Operating margins had completely collapsed. The company had changed the CEO already and had an interim CEO come in from the board. Let me repeat that: falling sales, weak operating margins, stock price was way down, interim CEO from the board. Probably sounds familiar. We turned the business around. Then we grew the business low-mid single digits and near double digits for seven years. We expanded gross margins over 1,000 basis points and expanded operating margins way beyond the original 10% target we set early on. Logitech became an amazing place to work, full of innovation and love for consumers, and most of all, design, because design correlated with consumer obsession. Our stock grew more than tenfold, and in fact, it's 13 times higher today than it was when I took over as CEO.
And I believe it'll continue to grow for many years to come because I don't do anything for the short term. By comparison, when I joined V.F., the analysts were kinder to me. Thank you. None of you wrote, "Mouse Guy Takes Over Fashion Company," but you could have. You acknowledge they came from outside the industry, but not too far outside. My 12+ years in fast-moving consumer goods at P&G put me in some of the same neighborhoods as fashion, where it's widely accepted that product and marketing weave together to create margin expansion and strong growth. The situation at Logitech and the one at V.F. were uncannily similar: sales falling, operating margins collapsed. You know the story. So I've been in very familiar territory since I arrived.
I'm often asked, "How is this situation different from Logitech?" I usually answer, and I've answered many of you, "They're so similar." But as I started to prepare this presentation, I thought, "There's one big difference." I have another decade of turnaround and growth wisdom in me this time, and I'm pouring every ounce of it into V.F. With that in mind, what are you going to hear from us today and from whom? I'm going to kick things off by laying out the broad enterprise strategy and the roadmap we're pursuing. Abhishek Dalmia, our Chief Strategy Transformation and Digital Officer, will then talk to you about what we're doing for the overall company. He's an exceptional fit for this role, coming to VF as a top-rated managing partner from BCG, where his work focused on this industry.
We're quickly implementing the best of what our entire industry has implemented and beyond in a very short time frame. Martino Scabbia Guerrini, who many of you already know, our Chief Commercial Officer and President of our emerging brands, will follow with an update on our progress within the commercial organization. He was a creator and leader of the ultimate pilot for much of the commercial organization we have today, our EMEA region, which has operated this way for a decade and through that time outgrew the Americas dramatically in revenue and operating margins. He's an exceptional leader and an exceptional operator in this industry and has a remarkable history of region and brand building. Brent Hyder, our Chief People Officer, will explain how we're transforming the culture as we cultivate talent within the organization to support our strategy. He's an absolute unicorn.
He started his career running a retail store in Denver and did that all the way up through a COO role, The Gap, until his love for people drew him to the CHRO role, the Chief People Officer role. He climbed that ladder right up to one of the biggest seats in the world as CHRO, Head of People for Salesforce, working directly for Marc Benioff. He came here because he loves retail, and he wants to finish his career here. Paul Vogel, Chief Financial Officer, will quantify our goals and give you the specifics behind the roadmap. Paul, you've heard from. In fact, he's one of you. He's sell-side, buy-side, but he really cut his teeth as a CFO, creatively helping bring Spotify to the public markets via an unconventional direct listing and then dramatically improving its profitability as it experienced high growth.
Learning how to grow revenue aggressively while adding costs stubbornly is exactly where we're headed in the later stages of this turnaround. Before I say anything else, I want to look back briefly. I've spent a career seeing people give presentations like the one I'm giving to you. I've seen a lot of powerful presentations in my career, but I learned really early, presentations are only worth listening to if the presenter does what they say. You will have noticed so far that I don't make too many public commitments. I take my commitments very seriously. So what have we said so far? One of our first commitments was that we would strengthen our balance sheet. I said, "We'll pay the $1.7 billion of term debt due by the end of the fiscal year through lower inventories, selling assets like capital equipment and selling brands." What did we actually do?
We lowered our inventory by over $500 million. We immediately reviewed all our non-brand assets, and we sold our two planes, our hangar, and our real estate, some real estate. We sold it fast, and we sold it for the right price. We conducted a strategic portfolio review and then announced the Supreme divestiture just five months later. We then paid the $1 billion term loan early. There was no penalty for that when the cash came in, and we'll pay down the $750 million of April maturity before it's due. We also said we'd take out $300 million of cost and implement all actions by the end of the fiscal year, first half of the fiscal year, and we've done that too. And we're not stopping there, as you're going to hear about later today.
We said we needed to change the operating model we had in the Americas. In EMEA and APAC, we had a strong model with regionally based teams. In North America, the execution was kept together with the brands. This duplicated organizations in the U.S. and gave us mediocre execution in the Americas. Ten months ago, we established a single unified global commercial organization to ensure we had the same integrated, intense marketplace execution across our brands in our home market. We're seeing good progress, and you'll hear more about specifically what we've done later when Martino does a deep dive. I didn't explicitly say it, but I implied I needed a terrific and aligned team. I expanded my global leadership team to include new critical capabilities such as design. 12 of the 15 members are new to their roles or new to VF.
Brent will walk you through the evolution and how we're establishing a new culture and mindset alongside that new leadership team a little later. Finally, every financial commitment I've made to you so far, we've met or beaten. We've been selective about them. But in each case, annual cash flow, quarterly guardrails, we say and then we do, just like what we said above. Why am I starting here? Because I want you to be assured we will not just say today, we will do exactly what we're saying. Today, we'll talk about the top half of this slide, our enterprise and financial game plans. As you know, later in the year, we'll talk about the brands in a second Investor Day. What is an enterprise strategy anyway? In this case, it will give you a look at how we think about three things.
First, how do the brands we have fit into the portfolio? What's the organizing principle? What are the capabilities we're building to create an advantage in having a portfolio at all? And third, within that, what will be different about how we operate this portfolio compared to other companies that have multiple brands? Okay. And on the right side, what is a financial strategy? Well, it could be a lot of things. But in this case, we'll give you a sense for what P&L structure we're creating. We'll also try to give you confidence that our structure and our approach will build sufficient investment and margin expansion at the same time to create a sustainable and attractive growth engine. Within our financial discussions, we'll also highlight how that will enable us to bring down our leverage to appropriate levels.
When we come back later in the fiscal year, we'll cover the bottom part of this slide. We'll go deeper into the brand strategies. I'm going to dive into the enterprise strategy with the help of Abhishek, Martino, and Brent, while Paul will cover the financial plan. We are a portfolio company and have almost always been. What do all these brands have in common? How can we create value with them as a single company? And how will we unlock that value? Our brands have an underlying performance basis. Each one is built on a performance foundation, and most have rich histories reflecting that. In The North Face, it's helping you thrive in the toughest extremes on Earth. Last week, we sponsored about 150 athletes, and last week, we had almost all of them in Denver. They climb Everest. They ski sheer faces. They compete in the Olympics.
They climb free solo up stark walls of rock with no ropes, and a lot more. In Vans, performance is skateboarding and BMX and snowboarding and surfing. In Timberland, it's work, hard work. In Dickies, it's work too. I'm not going to go through all the brands, but they all fit, some more tightly than others, but there's a performance-centered functional advantage required in our products, and respect for our equities is true across these brands. Of course, only a very small percentage of our products are bought by people climbing Everest or winter sports or skateboarding or in Vans' case. A much larger segment of people are inspired by that sport or the lifestyle or the attitude associated with it, and that's the quiet foundational advantage of performance brands. The products still need to look and feel amazing because they will naturally be attracted to some into fashion.
But there will always be a performance foundation to our brands, and that will make us reliable growers long term. While our portfolio is anchored in performance, we're also changing how we operate as one company, how we operate this portfolio. We'll have lean central functions like finance, HR, IT, and others. The headquarters should be as lean and scalable as possible. Those at the top should help guide the direction, set the standards and expectations, and support the teams in their learning, including learning from each other. At VF, in the past few years, our multi-brandedness was actually a weakness. We were siloed, fragmented, and political. We were inefficient and ineffective. You can see the extreme of this problem in our most siloed area of the world, the Americas, our home market, where our performance lagged the rest of the world for years.
We held back our brands and regions as they struggled against each other and didn't learn from each other. It wasn't their fault. We unconsciously built a leadership system and an approach that allowed and even fostered it. In the future, our multi-brandedness will become our superpower. We will leverage it with one way of brand equity building, one way of looking at our financials, one way of creating amazing products and building great people and more, the VF Way. We won't have one brand. We will have something even stronger, one way, and it will be a lean framework to build our brands and our business. We'll keep learning about how to improve it and transfer that learning across all of our brands so that way we'll keep improving too.
We'll use the scale of our size where that's an advantage, like supply chain, and the power of our unique brands and understanding of local markets. We will standardize as much process as we can so we can enable decisions to be made closest to customers and brand leaders, faster and better. You'll see more on this later in the year when we talk about our brands, but you're going to hear echoes of this VF Way in Abhishek's and Brent's presentations later. The power of our brands and our VF Way of building them will create more and more advantage. This slide shows you six choices we're making at the enterprise level that affect every brand.
You've heard us talk about reinvesting to drive growth, with the focus of that reinvestment being on product design and innovation as well as brand building or marketing, the first two capabilities on this chart. Just like it did at Logitech, it all starts with great design. I love design, and I love products. It's in my blood. What I found here is that design was too far down in the organization. These brands are built on great products, and it starts with the choices you make in design. The brand presidents need design on their staff, and the merchandising leaders need to see design as their equal partner, not their direct report. In my experience, where design reports in an organization is a pretty good proxy for how powerful and innovative it is in the company. None of our teams had design reporting to the presidents.
And the CEO of VF has never had a head of design for the enterprise overseeing the craft, the talent, the culture, and the capabilities of design. Now we do, and our design will steadily improve over time across all our brands. Marketing has changed so much in the past 20 years, past five years. We're taking our marketing engine from a more conventional one to a much more modern and efficient one. We've been slow to move there, but we're moving fast today. ROI will increase dramatically in the years ahead. You'll hear more about this from Abhishek in a few minutes. Our global commercial platform, which I've already talked about, will be covered in Martino's update again later, but it is absolutely central to our operating model. We will learn in a way only a multi-brand building company can, across our brands and always on.
Integrated business planning is a mouthful, and it's also absolutely central to our operation and profitability as well as our working capital usage. This is an area where we can do a lot better. It'll lead to higher gross margins and lower inventories. We're investing heavily in this space. Abhishek will give you a little glimpse of just how much we're going to transform this area. Now, if the first four of these capabilities or these advantages on this chart, if the first four really work, our organization capabilities that show up in improvements within functions for the most part, and I can go through each one of them. The last two are capabilities that will show up across all the functions over time.
The buzzword of the year is AI across all industries, and I came from tech, so you can imagine I know the hype curve and I think I know where we are on it. But AI is super important to this industry and this business. We're already well downstream on using AI in very high ROI use cases, and there's more to come. Finally, Brent will explain to you how we're going to build talent here: academics, coaching, stretch roles, and more. I had the benefit of working at some academy companies: P&G, where you learn to build products, to market, and to run a business. GE, where finance talent and general management talent were absolutely sacrosanct. But I've never seen it done the way we plan to do it here at VF.
Now, before I move to the next couple of slides, let me talk about what we're going to share in the financial section later. As we began to think about this one-two analyst investor day approach, I reflected on discussions I had with many of you, many of you analysts, investors, etc., many of you watching right now or in this audience. I got two persistent questions that really stuck with me. First one was, "When are you going to get back to good operating margins, Bracken?" Second was, "How much growth will you need to do that?" and I'm looking around to see if I can see people who have literally asked me this question. I see one right in front of me. Before I go further, let me be clear. We are all here and in the company VF, all here for sustained and profitable growth.
It's all about growth. Most of my leaders came from Paul to Abhishek to Brent, all the brand presidents, all came recently from high growth environments. My whole career and personal life has been completely focused on growth. Martino outgrew the rest of the company in his field responsibility inside VF forever, so we are going to grow, but for today, we're going to set it aside. We're going to set aside how much we're going to grow, and we're going to explain what sort of business financially will we be growing. Here's our commitment. Even with no incremental revenue, we'll be at 10% operating margins in fiscal year 2028, and we'll reduce net leverage to two and a half times or below by fiscal year 2028. That's with no growth, and growth will come, but we will grow on a foundation of a very healthy P&L.
That's 55 points of gross margin in our case and 45 points of SG&A. Before I hand you off to the rest of the team, let me talk about you, investors, and why we are an interesting investment opportunity, and this is a reflection of the hundreds of conversations and discussions I've had with you and with the benefit of knowing as an insider what we're up to. In the short term, VF shares are trading way below our historic highs. We have high leverage today, but as you're going to see, we have a clear path to deleverage, which we've already started to achieve. Our operating income is at historic lows. We have a clear path to much better operating margins, even with no growth at all, and growth will come, and that's just the short term.
Longer term, we have a path to 10% operating income plus the impact of growth on leveraging our costs. We have a very, very powerful portfolio of brands in attractive and growing markets. In fact, our markets in general are forecast to grow between 3% and 6%. We have an exceptional management team, and we'll be building key capabilities to advantages versus the rest of the industry. Now I'm going to ask Abhishek to come up and talk to you about our transformation program. He's going to talk about eight to nine different projects, but we're working on a lot more than that. With that, I'll hand it over to Abhishek. Please welcome to the stage Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Abhishek Dalmia.
Thank you, Bracken. Good morning, everyone. I'm so energized to be with all of you today. Everyone loves a comeback story. VF is an exciting comeback story in the space of apparel and footwear, and I'm eager to walk you all through how that will unfold. As we architect this turnaround, I do want to share three things today. One, how are we leading this turnaround? Two, what is the roadmap ahead for the reinvent program? And then three, why do early proof points and examples of progress give us confidence in this turnaround? This leadership team has cumulative experience of more than 20-plus large-scale transformations, which have been successful. One of the key learnings that some of the turnarounds are not able to unlock full potential is the fact that they focus on the what and not so much on the how.
They focus on cost-cutting, but not on capability gaps and opportunities for growth. Before I dive into some of the specifics of the what, let me briefly talk about the how. We are executing this turnaround with focus on our large brands, but are quickly scaling it to all brands in our portfolio. We are running this turnaround as one integrated program. Why does that matter? This allows us to keep an eye on interdependencies, realize synergies, and drive scaled impact. We have deliberately structured the program as key work streams. These have targeted, empowered teams for faster decisioning. What does this ensure? This ensures speed and agility. As the leadership team, we are coming together constantly to check progress, track value delivery, course correct, and push pilots to scale. Now, one might ask, why so?
This ensures transparency on progress and constant two-way communication between the leaders and the teams. This approach is actually starting to show results. And most importantly, it is starting to shift the culture of the organization. Any large-scale turnaround, cultural transformation is extremely important. And you will hear Brent talk more about it shortly. So let me talk about the what. Let me give you some insights into the key work streams that are significantly expanding our operating income and are well underway. But let me also remind these position us strongly to drive future growth, starting with reduction of SG&A. This is a medium-term opportunity worth $250 million-$300 million of SG&A reduction net of all reinvestment. And there are four key work streams here. Four-wall expense, both store fleet and store labor is a significant cost item on our P&L.
I will share an example here soon, but our approach and capabilities here are a bit dated and manual, which results in overspending. Digital and technology, we are above the industry benchmark in our technology spend, primarily driven by a lot of duplicative technologies and a significantly high contractual labor spend. We are laser-focused on fixing this, addressing overall spend, complexity, and accelerating our ability to deploy our capabilities. We are looking at optimizing and incremental savings from distribution and logistics, and we are further driving organizational effectiveness by simplifying our operating model and ways of working. You all heard Bracken talk about why gross margin in our business is extremely important. It is an extremely important opportunity to expand gross margin in our business right now, and in medium term, this is an opportunity of about $250–$300 million.
Please note, this incremental opportunity is beyond the inventory reset actions that Bracken and Paul have spoken about in the past. We have three key areas here where we see significant value coming to us. One, product creation, which is all about SKU productivity, and we have a significant amount of work going behind the scenes. Two, integrated business planning, which is about buying, allocation, and inventory trading. A lot of jargon. I will unpack that a little bit shortly. But in short, it is about the right product in the right channel at the right time, and finally, around markdowns, managing our markdowns more efficiently through a data-driven approach has a significant margin opportunity for us. Finally, I will touch briefly on the top-line growth levers as well. Bracken did highlight that we purposely split this into two parts.
You will hear our brand presidents come in and talk about the growth as part of part two of the investor day. But let me touch briefly on two key work streams that are starting to support our growth agenda. One, global brand positioning work, which is focused on deep understanding of our consumer, their functional and emotional needs, our competitive landscape, the size of the market, the brand's right to win in that space. This, we will be able to do more effective activation along assortments, our pricing architecture, creative, and distribution channel choices based on this work. And last is about marketing effectiveness, and I will touch upon that as one of the key examples as I talk about the why.
Overall, just to remind, we anticipate about $500 million-$600 million of operating income expansion, primarily between gross margin and SG&A, and this will be all net of reinvestment. So I talked about the how, I talked about the what. Let me talk a little bit about why we have the confidence in what we are doing. Let me start with an example of integrated business planning. Bracken talked about this being one of our differentiated capabilities. Let me give an example of one of the use cases under the umbrella of integrated business planning: inventory trading. What does that mean? Imagine you are in this business and you have only one product, and you have 1,000 units of those products that you need to sell after already buying and after already allocating initially at the start of the quarter.
Imagine you only have two partners selling those 1,000 units. You have allocated 500 units to each of these partners at the start of the quarter. This inventory is only allocated to these partners, but still sitting in your DCs until you ship it to the partners, which does throughout the quarter. Now, imagine during the quarter, one partner is selling faster than you anticipated, and the other one is selling slower than what you expected. If you don't do anything, what will happen? One is sitting with extra inventory, and one is actually out of stock. You end up with excess inventory, and you end up with lost revenue. Moving inventory from a slower-selling partner to a faster-selling partner is basically inventory trading. This seems foundational, right? What is the problem?
We have millions of units, and we have thousands and hundreds of partners, which we need to kind of work around. And our processes are highly manual. This means we only identify and execute fewer rebalancing trading opportunities. This is where AI is not just a buzzword. We are addressing this by deploying machine learning and doing real-time decisioning. With this, we are able to uncover and execute almost 25x more trades within the quarter. You see on the chart on the top, few of the seven-to-eight red dots, those were the red dots that we identified through manual process, and a large set of blue dots that you see on that graph are actually identified with the algorithms and which can be executed in an automated way.
This simple use case scaled across our 11 brands and the three regions is almost $50 million of gross margin expansion due to higher sales capture and lower excess inventory. Now, add to this, there is a larger unlock where we take a more AI-driven approach to inventory buying, demand planning, initial allocation, and replenishment to our partners and to our own doors. Another great example of a huge impact is store labor scheduling. Currently, our labor scheduling processes are fragmented. Most of the time, our store associate scheduling does not match consumer traffic. Connecting labor scheduling to consumer traffic is a significant unlock to save cost and to also improve consumer experience, which results in higher revenue. So how are we doing that?
We are actually deploying improved scheduling methods, which are more data-driven, more driven by the traffic of the store at an individual store level, and we are aligning incentives for associates to better connectivity to the traffic. We are not just matching supply to demand by day part, but becoming more dynamic and fluid, and we are taking a pilot-based approach to scale these changes, constantly learn, and course correct. We are starting to see the results. These changes are helping our associates double the time they spend with their consumer, leading to better experience, but most importantly, by allocating the labor for the right traffic, we are able to take out massive labor from the time that we don't need it, which is resulting in a significant cost saving. Similar data-driven work is happening in store fleet optimization as well.
Together, these are expected to drive almost another $50-$60 million of improvement in SG&A. And Martino will talk a little bit more about it. And more importantly, this will elevate our consumer experience, which in return will elevate our conversion and revenue. Talking about marketing, there are three key areas of clear opportunity for us to drive better effectiveness. Effectiveness, not efficiency. One, we are telling too many stories. We are cutting down to tell fewer, more impactful stories. This allows us to free up dollars on creative spend, on non-working spend, and repurpose to tell those fewer stories even better. Two, you heard Bracken talk about modern marketing. We are evolving our approach and shifting significantly to modern marketing. We are rewiring our marketing processes to start with social at the center of marketing. And we are developing capabilities to work seamlessly with our influencers.
Lastly, I again would not say GenAI for the sake of saying GenAI. We are starting to pilot GenAI for content creation across all our regions. This is a huge unlock to drive speed and also improve our spend. Again, I want to remind, as Bracken highlighted, we will invest in marketing. But that investment is coming in by becoming more effective in our marketing spend. In summary, I hope these granular insights on the actions we are giving you give you a real picture of what's happening behind the scenes, both in terms of extent of change, but also speed and urgency, and executional certainty with which we are approaching the VF turnaround.
And the excitement we have on the back of the tangible momentum that is unfolding is further boosting our confidence in our ability to deliver the $500 million-$600 million operating income expansion in the medium term. Thank you. I look forward to the questions, and I'll invite Martino now onto stage. Please welcome to the stage Chief Commercial Officer Martino Scabbia Guerrini.
Good day, everyone. Nice to see you here. Five seconds on me for people I haven't met in person. I'm a brand guy in the business with a true global mindset and a passion for elevation and change. And actually, connecting to what Bracken said, my first turnaround was when I was 29, and it happened here in New York, where I was sent from Italy, and I ended up living for four years.
So something closes today around that, and I'm pleased to be in the city again. So you got a lot of information so far, right? And I would like to take you actually through a more visual story across the marketplaces. And I'm here representing thousands of people, the business teams, those talents out there across all the regions, really doing it every day. They're managing the business, managing stores, managing sales, assortments, great store events. So really trying to bring our brands in their best version to life across the marketplaces. So first, I think Bracken said it very well. We've been focusing to create a very consistent frame for our business execution. And that's why we established nine, ten months ago what we call the Americas platform. And I think that's important because by activating that, now we have a very consistent execution model.
And we're not creating from kind of like a blank sheet because basically, we've been really using the reference out of Europe over the last 10, 20 years, then applied into Asia and try constantly to evolve it and make it better, but really kind of like apply a model that we had that was existing. And by doing so now, we have a better opportunity to be very consistent, much faster, probably leaner to move talent around and execute the business across all the regions within a frame. Believe me, this is important because it gives you an agility, flexibility, and a know-how that it will be difficult to transfer if you don't have the same model, the same organizations in place. Visually, three examples of great brand activations that we've been executing through different regions in a very consistent way.
North Face Climbing Festival, it started over here on the river in Brooklyn, between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Then it was exported to London and Canary Wharf, where 45,000 people back in July really gathered over two days of climbing activities, athletes, and community. It was exported into China. The second is really the Vans activation that started in LA during Frieze, but it was not only an event. It was about off-the-wall pinnacle products. It was about community events during the day. It was about really meeting the most important accounts. It was moved into Paris during Fashion Week and then in Shanghai on The Bund. Believe me, those events are unique. You see this picture. We took over a full iconic place in Paris, the full Montmartre Sacré-Cœur Hill with 5,000 people gathering at night with the best catering in the world.
It's not only about the brand heat. It's also really about the grassroots, so really how we work both with global passion, but then local relevance into the execution, and another example is Timberland. When we launched the collaboration with Vuitton back in January, we took over Paris. You could see Timberland outdoor all over the city in many very different innovative ways, and then we've been replicating that into the famous crossing roads of Shibuya and Tokyo and across the city, and then more recently into London and Milan for similar launches or peak times in the brand, so this is an example on how you really manage through existing formats or great ideas, but then also scale them across to be relevant with consumers across the world.
When we talk about the Americas platform, first of all, let me give you a little bit of a sense in 10 seconds. What do we mean with commercial platform? What do we mean when we say we regionally execute our business? It's pretty straightforward. We have regional leaders in the region with brand teams led by general managers by brand. Each general manager has a team, merchandiser, driving assortments, marketers, sales, retail, and then all together with the functional leaders in the same regions, so HR, supply chain, finance, and all that, working in a very integrated way, hopefully very intensively and effectively to really execute our business in that region and make the marketplace the most strategic and effective we can. The brands are feeding that global vision, strategy, and products through those organizations. So it's really a big partnership.
I like to say that when brands and regions come together best, we're truly globally in the best possible way. Three things out of the Americas region construct and the way we're progressing pretty fast. We did this 10 months ago. The three main areas that I want to quickly give you a sense are operational discipline and performance management. Bracken said it pretty well. It was a little bit fragmented. It was not leveraged across. There was not a one vision, one lead. I think what we did very quickly was to really establish discipline into the basics, so forecasting with much stronger accuracy, demand driver understanding, inventories, open-to-buy process, costing and pricing, but then, of course, scaling those into the front. The second piece of that is really the way as we're working.
I'll give an example later on key account governance, which I think is very important. We're very proud to see wholesale as a core activity for us in the core of our growth. How do we look at those strategic partners? How do we really partner with them and plan the way we grow the business in a longer term, in a sustainable way? Number three is really the commercial opportunities and how we catch them in a very agile way. In Europe, in Asia, thanks to those commercial organizations, we've been expanding, for instance, in geographies. Right now in Europe, we're looking at Middle East. We're looking at Eastern Europe markets that maybe we didn't have 10, 15 years ago, and then the same in Asia with Southeast Asia or smaller developing countries.
And why we shouldn't do with the same effectiveness the same here in Central America, in Latin America. I mean, those opportunities are relevant, and I don't think we have done enough for those. So as we move into the execution, I said, "I want to talk about wholesale." And I'm proud to talk about wholesale because there are great multi-brand retailers out there that are honestly doing a great job. They're doing an excellent job to engage, excellent job to have customers coming back, consumers coming back to their stores. Their traffic is good. And actually, they're expanding. We've seen big players expanding from the U.K. into America, big players going the other way. We have more and more global partners today than ever, and we have local partners with very specific relevance. So the way the governance works is pretty simple.
We come together as a group of leaders, brand managers, and all that, and we try to strategically think, "How do we grow with a certain partner? What are the best commonalities between our brand consumers and their consumers? How do we feed the right assortments? How do we segment and activate and make sure that those partnerships can build and grow and build again?" And you see pictures of execution. The North Face at Dick's or Timberland launching a specific collaboration with American Eagle, Vans at JD, and so on, or collaborations between our brands exclusively launched at REI. In this case, it's Altra for Smartwool. So we have a portfolio. We can be relevant for those guys. They want to win with us, and we have to do a much better job.
I'm going to close on this, just reminding the fact that by doing so, we were able to grow in Europe significantly wholesale over the last 10 years. If we look at today, the top 10 or even top 5 key accounts, strategic key accounts that we have in Europe, the total volume with them is bigger than the top 5 or top 10 that we have in Americas. If you think Americas as a region is a one time and a half, it's one and a half bigger than Europe. Actually, after years of decline, so it could be even bigger than that, you understand the size of the opportunity. Activation of the best practices, focus on wholesale, discipline in how you plan and you're demand-driven with those partners, but of course, a passion for direct consumers.
More or less, these are the two legs of our business. And we're pretty balanced across the world. Half is wholesale with different formats and different, of course, commitments and engagement with the strategic partners, and half is direct to consumer, our e-commerce, our stores. And we take that pretty seriously. I mean, as a reminder, we have more or less 4,000 monobrand stores around the world. We own 1,200 of those because we also partner with some of the best retailers across Asia, Europe, Mexico, South America, to really implement the opening and the execution of monobrand stores in every region. And also, we have more or less 1,100 of those in Americas. So that's why it's as important as the wholesale business to make sure that we look at how we become more productive in our stores. How do we think different about experience or engagement?
In the Americas, we just made a decision that is actually a reference for the world. We are creating a common retail operational team led by a super talented retailer in order to really put in place a great backbone in the back of the house, and as we become hopefully excellent in those operational stuff, we focus on the brand people and the business people on the front, engaging with consumers in different ways, creating much stronger store designs. You see here an example of productivity on one side, less SKU in a store, more focus, clear storytelling, and how we bring virtual reality into a nice room to experience the garments or the kind of settings or the context that you're usually going to actually use those garments in a different way, and as we do that, we have the digital side of our direct to consumer.
Last year, our only commerce was approximately 18% of our total business, total revenue globally. So it is important, and it's going through a different maturity phase. So we need to innovate and change again. What we have done five years ago before COVID is no longer enough. So as we integrate the two through omnichannel capabilities, we're also doubling down on how we become more relevant in e-commerce. And it's content creation, it's speed, it's actually elevation of the site. If you go on your phones today or tomorrow, you may find a much more aspirational Timberland actually website that we quickly evolved into better visual, better consumer experience in a few weeks to really open it together with the launch of the iconic campaign, the one with Naomi Campbell. And today, we are in peak season for that brand being into the fall winter season.
So that's an example of how we have to become much faster and much better as we elevate and go to market for consumers. And last, also the fact that we are innovating in the way we go to different platforms. We use maybe other digital retailer platforms to operate as a monobrand. Also, we bring different types of commerce like renew products or re-commerce into consumer fruition. So I'm proud of saying that if we do all this together and if we elevate the consumer experience on both the physical and the digital and across with the omnichannel, well, then we can really unlock much more opportunities in what we control. So as a first wrap, what I try to visually bring you through, I think it's a little bit like the proof point of the past with the passion and the belief in the future.
As we establish this commercial global approach into the marketplace, it's clear that the two powers are really equally important, how we execute the business, but also how we elevate our brands through design, innovation, and also different marketing, I think, interaction with consumers. You see here is really about the social conversation. Sometimes it sparkles in Europe with, of course, a different ironic take from The North Face on iconic architecture and monuments, and then it goes across or physical events like the activation on The Bund in Shanghai that then gets replicated for store openings across the globe, including Dubai or Mexico City. It's important because my message here is that now we believe we have the right settings. We can really execute across.
As we innovate and change constantly in small things, but also in big things, then we can prove them, test them, and then scale them across. And this is happening in retail as well because retail never stops. So as we try new formats or new experiences or different size or different approach in maybe one place of the world, if it works, great, we can expand it immediately. If it doesn't, we're going to fail pretty fast and then move beyond that. So that's important. And that's why I said that. This is a slide I love because I think it's a clear example, visual example of one global consistency, The North Face retail footprint in a very diversified execution across the globe. So just come with me through this. You see an image from. I'm starting from top left, top right, whatever. Starting from there.
It's an image from our newly refit big The North Face store in London, Regent Street. But then, of course, you move to the next one, which is in Shanghai, a very performance pinnacle product-driven new concept that is actually celebrating the more innovative products and the Summit Series within the brand. And then you move and you see a recent refit right here in Williamsburg where we try to blend a more, I would say, specific identity into lifestyle and certain type of communities, but staying very true to the brand. And then you move actually into an execution in Singapore where it's so important to be right for a much warmer climate and much broader, larger base of female consumer.
So you see, and then you connect to the activities in the partner stores in the Alps where, of course, according to the season, you always want to focus on what you're going to do with that product. So probably this is an image from summertime, so trail running, and so on. And then we close with a Shanghai-only kids store. So again, you see our Asia team has opened already 20 or more of that concept very successfully. Those are North Face stores for kids. So, of course, different format, different probably locations, but this is important. And this is really recent images of what we have done over the last year. So I think this is powerful because we can build on this also in the way we partner with those global partners that are winning in the markets that I was mentioning before.
So without mentioning any, when you have really huge retailer expanding from Pan-European into becoming probably the biggest sports retailer in the U.S. through acquisitions or expanding to Southeast Asia with multi-brand formats, it's important that we are with them. It's important that we've been testing ourself, innovation, formats, and execution to engage consumers and replicate with them. And last but not least, I would like to mention our emerging brands. If we are truly effective and strong in the way we execute across the regions, then we have actually a platform for our emerging brands to kind of tap or tag on and move and grow faster. Emerging brands are seven brands out of our 11.
There are maybe today not as big as the ones that you know first, but altogether represent more or less $1.3 billion in revenue with a credible growth and a credible double-digit margin for us. So those brands could be golden nuggets for the future. We're going to be much more agile, but also disciplined about their role, what they need to do in the mid and long term, and also how we support them and maybe invest in those talents that are leading this brand with a much more entrepreneurial and aggressive approach, and I think these two examples are pretty good. One is Altra, our Altra, running shoe that is really getting traction today, growing double-digit in their first-quality business in Americas, but also expanding into Europe, and it's interesting.
It's a brand that is in the core of the activity is what I may say led by tech rep, not by sales rep, because it's really driven by the functionality, the specific technical feature, and how we explain it and make it available to runners through the key events in the right stores. And the second one is Icebreaker, as trying to expand the global footprint of this natural performance brand that we acquired from New Zealand right before COVID. And this is an amazing execution of a monobrand store in China where actually the brand is getting traction because of the premium positioning, very successfully launched on Tmall, and then immediately generated the interest of very important partners to execute the retail side in the most premium malls.
So without going into more details, I think it's important that we also remind we have the power of our portfolio. Bracken said it very right. So when I connect the dots on how we manage the effectiveness in our business, Abhishek gave you an example on retail fleet management. Now, through the commercial organization, we can be much more effective there, but also the elevation and the acceleration into the rest of our portfolio, which is equally important in our value creation thesis. And I think I hope you enjoyed the visual. And this is the only slide without visuals, so I'll be very quick. But I would like to close here. And you can read the slide. I would like to leave you with two messages.
One is about. I've been here for a while, as many of you know, but today I'm firmly a believer, and I'm confident in the who, in the how. I think we built a great leadership team because we had to change, and we had to completely rethink and innovate. And at the same time, I'm very confident that the talents that we have anywhere in the world, those thousands of people that are executing at best for us, for our brands every day, they're really effective. They're really ready to take this challenge on. And probably the model that we decided to have is also a very effective model that we believe for the best execution.
So with that, and with my also commitments to intensity, transparency, and real effectiveness, I leave you with one guy who, 600 plus years ago in Italy, he said something very important to me. Simplicity, not perfection, is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo da Vinci. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage, Chief Philosopher Brent Hyder.
All right. Good morning. Thank you, Martino. I learn from Martino every single day. I'm really grateful that he runs our commercial team. So thank you for that. And I'm grateful to be here together with you all today. It could be viewed as a bit of a crazy move to bring a Chief People Officer along into an investor day, to be honest, with an audience like this.
Having grown up in the operations side of the business, I know that your expectations of what I might have to say might be a bit of a low bar. So that's kind of exciting for me. But I do have a message, and the one that I think matters significantly to our plan to reinvent VF. So thank you for indulging me for just these few minutes. There are four areas I'd like to discuss today. First, the value of a committed leadership team guided by the right values, powered by the right operating model that's building an aligned team through a transparent plan, compensation strategies, listening platform, and capability developments. So we're going to start with the most important, and to me, the most important work any leader does is who they hire and who they fire.
Over the next 12 months, we've moved at lightning pace and built a talented, committed, experienced team. These are people that are proven results with proven results, successful companies. The team we have assembled will be a strategic advantage for VF, our teams, and customers and our investors. Including Bracken, he had mentioned this, 12 of our 16 leaders on the global leadership team are new to the company and/or in a new role. Most notably, I'd like to point out our brand presidents. Let's go through that. As soon as I arrived, we quickly developed an updated profile for our future brand presidents. What capabilities, what experiences, strengths that they need to have to successfully as quickly as possible? And then what they will need to do to sustain and build that success. And then we went recruiting. My favorite part. I love to recruit.
First, I'm going to start with Caroline Brown. She's an experienced apparel CEO and executive with a keen sense of what The North Face brand is and what it should represent through strong consumer connections to product quality and innovation combined with compelling storytelling. Her experience in luxury is critical as we continue to elevate The North Face product and build on the brand's recent recognition by Time Magazine as a top outdoor apparel brand in the world. Sun Choe is one of, if not the most talented product leader in the industry. Her experience at Lululemon and other brands at scale has prepared her well to deliver the next peak of the Vans brand. This, in my opinion, was a pure coup, and we are very fortunate to have her on our team. Nina Flood, many of you have probably heard of her.
She's our secret insider, we call her, who spent over 20 years delivering results around the world within VF. She's been building brands and driving commercial successes. She's a pragmatic leader who has a real capability and credibility in the industry and with our teams. And finally, the newest, Chris Goble, the creative and operational leader who brought Gap brand back into relevance. He is passionate about Dickies, the Dickies brand, and how to build it into a cultural movement. Now, one more notable I want to reiterate is an addition and an approach, something you've not seen at VF before. And Bracken mentioned this, and it's the appointment of Alastair Curtis as our new Chief Design Officer. Alastair's success is well known in the industry, and this is an intentional focus to build design capabilities and technical innovation across our portfolio.
He's a proven executive, and I'm excited to work with him, so in building this leadership team, we move quicker than I have ever seen at this scale, and for one reason, we need every global leadership team leader to believe in our mission and be willing to do what must be done to create the most successful multi-branded company in the industry. Obviously, I'm betting my own career on this team's success as well. It's one thing to build a team. It's another to build enough trust that we can actually move as fast as we need to move, and you build trust in many ways, but the most important way is through your values.
So this last April, we traveled to and met with our employees at the director level and above, about 900 people to align with our plans, but more importantly, the level set and how we're going to work together in the future. When I think about the most successful companies in the world, they all have one thing in common: a strong commitment to their values, a culture based on values. You don't have to agree to their values, but you do have to appreciate and respect what drives their success. And they make it clear. They align their incentives. They drive the behavior. If you're going to work there, you must align. Think about it. At their peak, and maybe when they strayed a bit, Apple, Disney, even NFL teams, you either sign up and do it or you leave.
One way or the other, you've got to accept those values. There's no other way. There's no other way. Some might feel that this is HR speak, but I'm convinced that this move to a values-based change agenda will drive a difference for our success, especially in the long term. VF lost its way. It's no secret on the value of growth mindset, simplicity, and winning together. We've brought them back, and they'll stay with us for the long term. So next, though, we needed a simplified operating model, which our teams are now calling our growth model. So this is the framework for how we're organized and how we'll build product and then bring it into the market. Over the years, this structure became very complex, duplicative, expensive, slow, and different by brand and region.
We took what made VF great, really, quite honestly, a plug-and-play operating model and let each brand team create their own model for creating product and bringing them to the market. Clearly, this mixed model was not a formula for success. We also didn't have the right leaders in place to evolve it. So instead, we're creating a standard, as Bracken mentioned, the VF way that's allowing us to drive faster decision-making and reducing SG&A as we go along. And just as importantly, it's focused on creating elevated product. While this is not necessarily a unique model, what is unique is the multi-branded approach, especially with consumer, customer, and regional feedback that you can see in the loop there, as well as career opportunities across the world. This is a good example of what Bracken is calling our superpowers. I love that. Our superpowers.
To this end, we're now analyzing every step of the model throughout the globe, every day, every role, every process. Our aim is to have this done, this next phase of optimizing our growth model completed by FY26, and we're well on our way. Lastly, we need to rebuild our culture through alignment, deep alignment. So as you know, that takes a minute or two to do at our scale, and it takes a great deal of energy. We have the team to do exactly that, align. There are three areas that we immediately focused on. First, strategic and process alignment. Easily said, not easily executed. I already spoke about creating the VF way with our growth model, but it's also critical to align all of our teams to our annual plans. Can they see where we are, where we're going? What's their part? How do they measure their success?
So to accomplish this, we adopted a simple model created by my friend, Mark Benioff, at Salesforce. You may have heard of him. It's called the V2MOM, the Vision, Values, Method, Obstacles, and Measures. It's incredibly simple. Now, everyone at VF has access to the enterprise V2MOM. They can see it. It's transparent. In addition, all of our functions, our regions, our brands have V2MOMs that ladder up, and they're fully transparent to the entire organization. Everyone can see them. As we move forward, we'll be driving this discipline through the company so that every single employee has their own V2MOM connected to team goals. So next, compensation alignment. For this team, it might be the favorite topic. Our incentives have been aligned to our financial goals across all businesses and throughout the globe. I know you care about this, and so do we. We've simplified the programs.
So compensation is aligned to specific financial goals: revenue, operating income, gross margin, for example. For now, we have eliminated all non-financial incentives so that every member of the VF team is focused on what we need to deliver for that year. At the same time, our executives have long-term incentives that are similarly connected to their performance and the company's performance. So as an organization, we're making it clear that we will only be rewarded when our customers are happy and they're buying and our shareholders are rewarded. Third, my favorite, cultural alignment. Just like in our personal relationships, you will not be successful without real-time listening.
One of the lessons I've learned from my 40-year marriage (I don't know why I smile and giggle every time I say that, but it's true) 40-year marriage in building a family and a household culture requires that me or we shut up and listen, and more frequently than many of us want and would like at times, but it actually pays off. At VF, we've moved away from annual surveys where we really didn't know what our team was thinking at that very moment. It wasn't relevant. Great ideas were not flowing up fast enough. Bad news was not transparent enough, and it was impacting our business forecasting, and you saw it. Instead, we've moved to 24/7 feedback channels and monthly insight surveys every single month. 20% of our team receives a quick survey, and they tell us what they think today.
We use these insights to consider what and how we'll communicate or we should communicate, what we should train on, what we should teach on, and what we should talk about. And we're seeing signs of improving morale already, especially as our performance begins to improve. We're also right now building capability and career academies. Bracken's mentioned that several times to teach our teams how to be a great merchant, how to be a great designer, a product developer, an operator, etc., at VF, that VF way. Although I don't have the time to elaborate today on the topic, this could become one of the most important long-term competitive advantages that we will own.
One more component to building a culture, which I think is important to mention, especially considering that we're a physical product company, is the need to be together physically to build the best product and inspiring stories. We've clarified expectations. This seems simple, but you know it's not. We've clarified expectations of being together in our offices and with our customers. We cannot and should not underestimate that when you have a physical product, being together to create it, to build it, experience it requires people to be in person. While we have real flexibility with our teams to balance their multifaceted lives like all of us, we're confident that moving back to being together in person will and has begun to accelerate our performance, and we're actually really proud of that move.
So to recap, it's important that our culture and people develop directly support change to support our change agenda. We've made tremendous progress over the past year to build an experienced and committed leadership team that's focused on growth, guided by the right values, and who are empowering our compelling operating model that's building an aligned organization. That alignment is so critical. So thank you for listening to the HR guy. My work every day is to just clarify and communicate our plans to build the capabilities needed to build the best products, to tell the best stories, and create an environment where people can thrive and exceed and are committed to our results. I do believe that we're taking the right steps, moving fast, and look forward to your questions.
Thank you. Back to Paul. Please welcome to the stage Chief Financial Officer Paul Vogel.
Thanks, Brent.
I think you guys will all know why we at VF always say you never want to follow Brent on stage. I think you guys all realize that now. It's great to be here with all of you as part of the VF leadership team. I'm nearly four months into my role, and I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity we have in front of us. I joined VF as someone who is passionate about brands. From my prior experience, I've seen the power of strong brands. And when those brands innovate, there is no end to what can be accomplished. Having spent a large part of my career in technology and media, I know the importance of moving with agility and making decisions quickly.
I know what it takes to improve efficiency company-wide to drive high-quality growth, improve margins, and develop a scalable and successful operating and financial model. Additionally, before becoming an operator, I spent time as an equity research analyst and as an investor. Having been in both those seats, I can relate to how challenging that job can be. I have a deep understanding of what it takes to build trust with the financial community and what you're looking for in best-in-class businesses: consistency, transparency, directness, maybe with a bit of calculated risk, and we aim to deliver on all of those moving forward. So far today, you've heard our big-picture vision from Bracken, followed by Abhishek, Martino, and Brent, all providing their insights into how we are transforming the operating model.
I'm here to walk you through the financial implications of our strategy by providing the building blocks of how we intend to create a unique multi-brand business. Our focus is on setting a strong foundation supported by lower debt and improved capital structure, and by doing so, we aim to create a path to sustainable growth and financial resilience, so before I dive into the numbers, let me first highlight the power of our portfolio. VF is a collection of iconic and globally recognized brands, but together, they can be leveraged to create a one-of-a-kind operating model. As Bracken discussed, we have all the necessary ingredients within VF to unlock value, to truly maximize brand strength and build significant brand equity over the long term by creating high-quality products with distinct points of view that resonate with our consumers.
To do that effectively, we are laser-focused on strategically investing into innovation to drive quality growth while actively eliminating inefficiencies. So let me talk you through the financials. First, let's level set on the past few years. As most of you are keenly aware, revenues are down, margins are down, SG&A's percentage of revenue is up, and over the past few years, we have seen our operating margin cut in half, all while our leverage has increased. As this picture clearly shows, business has been tough. If you dive even further back, you will see we're even further away from the margins of a truly well-run VF. So how do we move forward? Over the past year, we introduced the Reinvent Transformation Program, our initial steps to changing the operating model at VF.
This program marked the beginning of a broader company overhaul and in reinventing how we will operate the business over the long term, creating a business model that is consistently striving for growth, innovation, and efficiency. We're already starting to see some initial signs of progress. Just looking at our earnings report from two days ago, we have seen four quarters in a row of improving trends, and gross margins are beginning to rebound. In addition, while we're seeing some green shoots emerging across our business, we are also now in a position to reduce debt and leverage with the proceeds of our recent sale of Supreme used for debt paydown. So this is where we are. Now we'll get you to where we're going and how we're going to get there. In the next few slides, we'll show the building blocks to achieve a 10% operating margin.
A financial profile we have a high degree of confidence in achieving even before we have any growth. Now let me talk you through our philosophy on how we get there. First, we are here to drive sustainable and profitable growth. Our approach to cost savings is not a one-time exercise, but intended to be ongoing with the goal of consistently reassessing our resources to drive higher utilization of our assets and leverage productivity. Second, we want optimal flexibility and don't believe in high leverage. This philosophy will influence our capital allocation decisions, and third, we'll continue to reinvent ourselves to ensure we continue to grow as an organization, and last, we value transparency both internally and externally, so as you heard from Bracken and others, we are making the necessary changes to achieve a 10% operating margin in fiscal 2028.
And we believe we can achieve this target even before layering on top line growth. This is not to say that we will not grow. We can and will return to growth. This is simply saying that we believe we can reestablish a healthy, solid foundation even without growth so that when growth returns, we will realize even more incremental benefits on profitability. But I want to be clear. We believe we should do better than this. But what we're putting on this slide is what we are 100% committed to achieving without a significant change in business mix or revenue growth. It's a reflection of only improving the metrics that are completely in our control. So how do we get there? We'll do this by improving our gross margin to 55% or better and lowering our SG&A to 45% of revenue or below.
Let me expand on these in more detail. So first, gross margin, as Bracken and Abhishek mentioned, this is probably the most important metric for us at the P&L, the best indicator of a healthy business. So let's elaborate on the building blocks of how we plan to expand gross margin from the 51.6% at the end of fiscal 2024 to 55% and beyond. First, many of you are aware of our fiscal 2024 reset actions, particularly our reset in the Vans business. We're already recapturing margin from these actions. As a reminder, the reset had approximately 200 basis points negative impact on our margins. The benefit of these reset actions is already showing up in our 2025 numbers and are in addition to the initiatives Abhishek mentioned earlier. Second is product creation.
This is streamlining and simplifying how we develop products by reducing the number of SKUs we create, consolidating materials within and across brands, and creating platforms and systems to elevate our product design and creation disciplines. This will lower our direct and indirect product costs. Third is integrated business planning. As you heard from Abhishek, we are leveraging AI tools and enhancing our forecasting capabilities to improve our initial inventory buys, product placement, and store replenishment. This will also allow us to better move in-season inventory based on sell-through. Overall margins will improve by getting the right product to the right place at the right time. And fourth is markdown management. We will further leverage AI-powered tools and demand forecasting engines to optimize discounts and reduce our reliance on markdowns. This initiative allows us to be more proactive and is surgical in how we leverage markdowns.
Importantly, we believe the investment in integrated business planning will also lower the need for markdown management overall in the future. In total, these initiatives will drive margin and working capital improvement by lowering product costs, reducing discounts, and improving product sell-through. It is not driven by assumed changes in business model or channel mix. Now let's unpack our SG&A in more detail. Today, it sits at 46.5% of sales, but we believe there is a significant opportunity to drive a minimum of 150 basis points of improvement moving forward. As you've seen from Abhishek's presentation, we are aiming for a lot more. That more will come without sacrificing opportunities to invest in growth. First, we recognize investment in brands, in product, and in marketing are all critical to supporting growth, and we will not underinvest in those areas.
Second, inflation happens every year on people and other costs, but managing that impact is within our control. So we know from the outset we already have two scenarios of likely yearly cost increases. But since our goal is to find pockets within SG&A to reduce costs, we have identified a number of areas with large opportunity to optimize: digital and technology. As you heard from Abhishek, we're reducing our technology cost base through rationalization of our contract labor and vendor spend, as well as consolidation of our applications and platforms. On the retail side, we see material improvements in store labor and expenses.
This is a multifaceted initiative that will include leveraging advanced analytics to optimize our store fleet and better align locations with consumer demand, improving our labor scheduling models to better match in-store labor resources to store traffic, and standardizing processes and implementing best practices across brands, which you heard about from Martino. We also see big opportunities in distribution and logistics. We are optimizing our supply chain network and distribution center capacity to drive improved profitability through lower logistics, shipping, and distribution costs. And last, as we have discussed, we continue to refine and improve our overall corporate organizational efficiency. This is a continuous improvement model. We are committed to further optimizing the operating model and driving efficiencies throughout the organization and the P&L. So as you can see, we have several tangible and in-process initiatives to meet or exceed our medium-term targets for both gross margin and SG&A.
But what excites me the most is that these initiatives are not just aspirational. We already have project teams executing on each of them already. At this point, we have walked through our medium-term business model that returns VF to at least a 10% operating margin. And this is a foundational model. But as we have also said, we are all here for growth and expect to see an inflection and eventual acceleration in revenue trends. And when that occurs, we will see additional leverage in the model as very likely. So as an example, there seems to be no change to our product or business mix. On SG&A, excuse me, on SG&A, roughly 55% of our costs are either fixed or fully within our control, while 45% are variable and rise or fall with revenue and product growth.
So, thought of another way, for every 10% of growth or roughly $1 billion in revenue, you should expect to see 150-200 basis points of incremental flow-through to our operating margin. Now, if revenue materially accelerates, we will likely drive even more investment back into the business. But you can easily see the upside in this model. So I spent most of my time on the prior slides walking through our foundational P&L model. That model will enable us to return to strong and sustainable cash flow and, of course, supports a healthier balance sheet. With that, let me be clear on our capital allocation priorities and how we order them. First, we are committed to reducing debt. I'll provide more detail on the next slide, but at a high level, we have a plan to pay down upcoming maturities. Second, we will continue to reinvest.
We are already reinvesting a portion of our cost savings back into the areas that will drive profitable and sustainable growth, namely in product design, innovation, and brand-building activities. Third is evaluating an increase in the dividend. Returning capital to shareholders has always been a part of the VF philosophy. However, we will prioritize debt paydown and investment opportunities first. And fourth would be share buybacks. As the business improves over time and our leverage ratios improve, we would consider share buybacks. And last, and somewhat independently, would be our portfolio. We are a company that is always looking to optimize our portfolio. This has and will always be an evergreen process. We strive to be purposeful in ensuring we can add value through the brand assets we have under the umbrella. To reiterate, the top two priorities right now are focused. The top two are our focus areas right now.
Strengthening the balance sheet and achieving the capital structure that is right for our business remains one of our top priorities. Our fiscal 2024 year-end leverage was roughly five times. With the sale to Sycamore, we are well on our way to materially lowering that ratio. We have used the proceeds from the Supreme sale to pay down the $1 billion of debt due in December 2024, and we are committed to paying down the second tranche due April 2025. Moving forward, we will continue to prioritize free cash flow and debt reduction with a stated goal of achieving a leverage ratio of 2.5 times or below in fiscal 2028.
On free cash flow for fiscal year 25, after incorporating the additional exit costs for the initiatives highlighted today and the divestiture of Supreme, we are on track to achieve free Cash f low of $425 million, inclusive of the sale of non-core assets. Beyond this year and over the medium term, we will continue to drive sequential year-over-year improvement in our free cash flow, driven by operating margin expansion and optimization of inventory and working capital. Remember, reducing leverage is a top priority. So we are a team that is focused on the long term and will always optimize with that in mind. That being said, we see several near-term opportunities, many of which have already begun to take hold, and we expect improvements to come steadily throughout the next few years. So bringing it all together, I would hope everyone would come away with a few key takeaways.
First, we are here for growth and are committed to re-accelerating our revenue trends over time. Second, we will operate efficiently and are committed to a 10% operating margin in a no-growth scenario, which we believe is a very, very conservative assumption. And third, we are committed to reducing our leverage and building sustainable shareholder value over time. So thank you very much. And with that, I'll let Bracken up for Q&A.
Okay. Who'd like to go first? I don't see any hands up. Oh, there. Great.
If you guys just wait for microphones. Okay. Jay Sole, UBS. Bracken, thanks so much for this great presentation and great day.
Thank you.
I have one question for you and then one question for Paul.
Sure.
You talked a lot about design, not just today, but since you arrived at VF and the importance of it. And you also talked about One VF today, which I don't think we've heard a lot about, One VF Way. And tell me how you sort of balance the idea of empowering designers who are creative by nature at the same time putting them into a process that has to be the same globally that everybody has to stick to. How do you make sure that you're pulling out that creativeness without stifling people by boxing them into a process that has to be the same everywhere in the world? And then for Paul, my question for you is you talked about 10%, and I think you just said it's a conservative—you believe it's a conservative assumption, not based on sales growth. But what if sales are weak?
We could have a recession. Things could happen macro-wise, China, who knows? Is it possible if sales are down 3%, 4% for the next couple of years, what would the operating margin look like in that scenario? Thank you.
Okay. So to answer your question, so you know what? Probably I have to dimensionalize how far away we were from One VF a year ago. And we're still far away from it. We still have a long way to go to get there. We had, I think I'm right, at least 13 different product development processes. If you're a designer and you've got 13 different product development processes, people are almost picking their own processes. We're creating new processes all over the place. We're not learning how to do any of that more efficiently. So you've got too much time spent being creative about how to do it, what's the process, and not enough time being creative on what's it look like and what's it going to feel like.
This simplification of the number of ways to do things is actually an unlock for more creative, more power in what we put out there, both from a marketing standpoint and from a product standpoint.
Yeah. I mean, I would say on the revenue side, I'm not going to necessarily get into hypotheticals. I would say one of the things we are doing as a company now is being an efficient company, thinking about costs, thinking about the best way to do things is just an evergreen process for us. And so I think you can imagine that if revenue doesn't come back in the way we expect, we'll be able to adjust accordingly. It's obviously not in our forecast or what we believe, but I think we've built the muscle memory now and the processes in place that we'll be able to adjust accordingly if things don't go as planned, which obviously none of us are banking on.
Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you very much, Adrienne, you're from Barclays.
Thank you.
My first question is on the construct of the channels sort of over this horizon, wholesale versus DTC specifically, and then the digital component versus the stores. And then for Paul, on the journey to the 10% operating margins, can you help us a little bit with the shaping of that? I would imagine most of that's going to happen in years two and three. Thank you very much.
Hey, Martino, you want to answer the first one? The question is, what's the distribution of our channels going to look like over the near term? I'm happy to do it, though.
Yeah. Thank you, Adrienne. I think, as I said, I tried to give a picture of the overall balance today. It's not going to change much. And I think I gave you a sense of how many opportunities we have across both legs at large, but then into the specific, when you look at channel regions and partners, there's even more. So I don't think I expect a major change of that. What I expect is that we can really try to move forward on all these opportunities in a very effective way.
What's the second question?
About the curve or linearity of the improvement. You want to take it? You want me to take it?
I'll take it. We're not going to guide you between here and there. So I think what we are going to do is guide every quarter. We'll give you a good sense for it. And sometimes we'll give you a little hint of what we see ahead if we feel like there's a need to do that. You want to add anything?
No. I would just say that I think we have a lot of initiatives. I think some of them are in place already. Some of them are getting started. They're all different stages. But as I said at the end of mine, I think what's so exciting for us is everything we put up here, none of this is hypothetical. These are actual tangible initiatives, most of which are already being worked on again. So that's what we feel really excited about.
Hi, Lorraine Hutchinson, Bank of America. Both of my questions are on the leverage target, but Bracken, can you first talk about the portfolio review that you've done? Is that complete? And do the targets include any further asset sales? And then for Paul, can you quantify or discuss some of the working capital contributors to that target? Thank you.
It's complete, and they don't include any asset sales.
Not going to be in the specifics, but I think part of all of the things we talked about in terms of inventory management, we believe working capital will benefit, but it's not going to be a big majority of the—it'll be an improvement, but it's not going to be the biggest part.
Okay.
Hi. Sam Poser with Williams Trading.
Hey, Sam.
Back when Lee and Wrangler were spun off to Kontoor, Lee and Wrangler were sort of the money, the cash drivers of the business at that time. And Vans and North Face were anticipated to be the cash drivers going forward. That didn't happen. So as you look at this, I mean, what do you need from the cash drivers of the business? What's going to be that? What are going to be those brands, or how do you think about that? And then how are those brands going to grow, whichever they are, and do what they need to do to sort of at least, I guess, provide the brand foundation of all the plans you put forward today?
Yeah, it's a great question. And looking back on the history of VF is super interesting for me. I love history. And VF has such a long history, including that period. I think the truth is our brand should be able to, most of our brand should be able to generate cash consistently. I mean, good businesses do that. We shouldn't need one big business to generate cash and then everything else spins it. That is a model you can do. Now, we still have room to invest into drive where we see higher ROI and better returns on that marketing dollar. We'll certainly have room to do that. We're doing it right now, in fact, in a couple of places that we're not talking about publicly.
But I don't think we need. I don't envision having a model like the old GE model where capital spins off all this cash and then the industrial business spins off all this cash and capital uses it, or where Jeans spins off a lot of cash and the rest of the brands use it.
Hey, guys. Thanks for all the questions today. Michael Binetti with Evercore.
Hey, Michael.
I guess maybe a different way to ask a question that was earlier. With the timing of cost cuts and reinvestments, does the 250-300 net savings build over a couple of years, or are the gross savings near-term offset by reinvestment? Should we think about the net part coming through later? It sounds like you have a few investments ready to go earlier in the phase. I'm just trying to think. Maybe you could tell us phasing on savings versus netting off with reinvestment. And then as I think about the commercial organization, the brands develop the product and the marketing, but I think the brand leadership does lose some control of how the brand shows up in the market or in a given channel, given the final strategies on how to show up rests with Martino's group.
And I think that that's caused some tension for the leadership at the brand level in the past. How are you balancing that in the go-forward strategy that we heard about today?
I'll answer the second one, and I'll let Paul not answer the first one. I'm kidding. I think that is a common question I've gotten since I've been at Logitech . And I'll phrase the question a little differently. Wait a minute. Now these brand presidents lose all this control into the store or into the wholesale channel. Isn't that going to create tension? Actually, it's the opposite. A great brand president realizes that Martino is a partner and that the person running their business inside the region is a partner and actually works for them, just like the brand president works for the company. And so they're just better at it because they've got all this learning that's coming across from all the other businesses. So you get the scale benefit. You get the better IQ.
And then the role of the brand president is to say, "Hey, here's the experience we want to create. Let me be really clear. This is exactly what our brand is all about. Here's the kind of experience someone should feel when they walk into one of our stores or even when they walk into a wholesaler. Here's the kind of experience." That kind of discussion, it needs to be an ongoing discussion. And in the best companies that operate this way, it is that way. And we will be operating that way. So I don't think if you ask our brand presidents, they'll say, "Oh my gosh, I lost all this control." I think if they could compare the before and after, they'd say, "Oh my God, I've lost all those headaches. Thank God I can focus on great product and great marketing.
Yeah. And to Bracken's point, I'm not going to answer the first question. I'm going to answer it. I'll answer it a separate way, which I think might be at least a little bit helpful since we did initiate quarterly guidance in this quarter, and we sort of talked about we're going to give quarterly guidance out and give out these midterm targets. I think the way we think about it is we should be able to run a business where we have a decent level of confidence in how we're doing in the next quarter. And we always want to meet those targets that we put out there. My view has always been, and then we're building this for the long term. So what we're really going after is those targets over two, three, four years. How do we get there and how do we achieve that?
To me, yearly targets, honestly, to some of the part of your question, it can be a little arbitrary, right? If some of these initiatives happen a little earlier, if they hit fiscal Q4 versus fiscal Q1 of next year, it could slightly alter, good or bad, a yearly target, which I just don't think is helpful or effective to anyone when you're kind of tweaking those up and down for things that could be really good or just get pushed off by a quarter or so. As Bracken said before, we'll give out the quarterly guidance. We will give you guys, as best we can, every couple of quarters, some touch points or some checkpoints on how we're doing and how we're monitoring ourselves against some of these targets.
That's how we think about kind of, A, the sequencing, but also hopefully that's a little bit of an understanding of why we chose to guide the way we're going to guide going forward.
Hey, Bracken. It's Bob Drbul from Guggenheim.
Hey, Bob.
Two questions, really. The first one is, when you think about the top-line framework over the medium term, I think you guys said you expect the marketplace to grow 3%-6% and where you're competing. What would be disappointing to you from a VF enterprise as you think about the brands and the marketplace today? And then the second question is, when you think about the level of reinvestment required, what would be the minimum reinvestment that you see? And when you think about the priorities of product development, innovation, brand building, what have you seen so far as the biggest level of reinvestment?
I will answer that question. But let me answer the first one. Yeah. We said that the forecasted growth rates for the various categories we're in, if you could aggregate them all up and stir them up in a soup, and it's hard to do that, would be 3%-6%. We're not going to give kind of any revenue guidance in this meeting. So let's just park that for a second. What I would say, what I would say is if you ask me, how do I think about growth? I'm going to tell you. It's on one of those slides, by the way. So if you read the slides and ignored what I was saying, you would have gotten this. Maybe it would have been more valuable for you. It's this. There's three ways to grow, and only three ways to grow in any business.
The first one is you're in a category that's growing. And if you're just growing with a category, you're growing about GDP. And you can do GDP around the world, come up with a number, low single digits, right? The second one is you build what we're trying to do, which is a better innovation engine, a better marketing engine than your competitors, than the other people in your industry. And then you grow market share. Let's say that gets you up to mid-single digits. And then you systematically should always be looking for where is the next category I can get into, or maybe even where's the next brand. Let's park that for a second. What's the next category I can enter with the Vans brand, with The North Face brand, with Icebreaker? And that gives you new category expansion. So that grows your market.
Those three things, if you get them all working in almost any business I can think of, on average, you grow double digits. I'm only here to try to grow double digits. I told the board that when I arrived. Now, are we going to grow double digits in a year or two? Probably not. But am I here for that? Absolutely. The second question reminded me of what it was. I got too excited about the first one.
I guess the second question is, what level of reinvestment is necessary to inflect sales growth?
Yeah. What we've done, we have a model for ourselves. We said, "What's the right level of spending on marketing? What's the right level of spending on product development? How far away are we from that? Are we on that?" And that's kind of a frame for us. And so I think the reinvestment going forward is kind of within that model. And we might at times decide, we might even decide, "We're going to increase the amount of the rate of spending on marketing relative to where we are today." We might increase that over time. And we'll do that, and it'll probably be gradual. We've taken some steps already to increase the amount of spending using the reinvestment we talked about to increase the amount of product development expense in a couple of our different places. And we've done some in marketing. We may do more.
We also may decide, "We've got room across our brands. The ROI over here looks really good. The ROI over here doesn't look as good." So it's hard to answer your question specifically except to say, "We're certainly going to reinvest where we think we've got a good return." But we think within the frame of what we've given you, that's probably about what we need.
Yeah. I think marketing is a great example, right? Because I think people sometimes look at it and say, "Just at a high level, what are you spending as a percentage of revenue on marketing?" But they could go many different ways. As Abhishek talked about, and as we think about new marketing strategies, it might turn out that our new marketing strategies are way more efficient, so we need to spend a little bit less. Or it may turn out they're way more efficient, which means we actually want to spend more because the return on them is far greater. And that's the conversations we're having internally all the time. So to look at it and say, "Hey, marketing should be X percentage of revenue," I think is, without this coming out the wrong way, too much of a simplistic way of looking at it.
We look at it sort of holistically. Are we getting better? Are we getting more efficient? Are the marketing dollars we're spending heading to a higher return? If they're a higher return, could we spend less? Or conversely, should we actually spend more to even accelerate things at a higher level?
Yeah. If I can come back to your first question, because I was thinking about what could come out of the answer I just gave. I would be miserable if it said, "Mouse guy thinks he can grow a fashion business double digits." So I'm just giving you my general theory. I really believe that. Now, will we ever grow double digits? I don't know. But that's what I want to do.
Okay. Yeah. I have a question regarding the cost cuts that you have. I'm just trying to understand how it's going to play out in the next few quarters, because it seems that at least in the next few quarters here, you're going to have a potential adjusted operating profit decline of 10%-20%, even with a revenue decline of 1%-3%. So is this cost cut and reinvestment front-loaded? Is it going to be in the first half of next year, or is it going to be even in Q4 of this year? So I'd love to understand a bit more how you're going to bridge the long term with the, let's say, next few quarters.
I'm sure there are a lot of people in the room who would like that. We're not going to give you that today, but I understand why you're asking. What I can say is we just got it for next quarter, and we're going to keep doing that. So we're a quarter out. We've given you kind of this medium-term expectation if you don't layer on growth. Now, the programs we put in place, if some of them operate really fast, some of them are going to take a long time. Some of them are going to just kind of play out over time. So we could probably, and we certainly do have our internal view of when things are going to happen. But we're not ready to talk about that publicly, and I'm not sure we ever will be.
What I want to get everybody in my team focused on, let's execute really well. We're going for something really meaningful and exciting in the long term, and now let's not get too caught up in one quarter over the next. We'll give you the next quarter so you can count on something. I can't guarantee it, but we're going to be pretty predictable.
Yeah. And the only thing I would say just on the quarters, which we've already talked about, is Q3 and Q4 of this year are still lapping our increase in salary and incentive comp, which had sort of gone away. And so we've talked about this as sort of being a pressure on SG&A in Q1 and Q2. We said it would be a pressure again in Q3 and Q4 as we annualize it. And then next year, it becomes much, much less of a headwind.
Thanks. And back here, Jonathan Komp from Baird.
Hey, John.
Looks like you've given us all the pieces over the medium term. If you grow in line with the market, essentially you can get back to a low teens EBIT margin in an upside scenario with growth. If we think back to the last time the business was low teens EBIT margin, you had Vans that was on its way to $5 billion in revenue and super profitable. So could you maybe just share a little bit more how to think about the role Vans has in the profit recovery if you've done what it needs to get back to being much more profitable and just any other construct around the brand profitability?
I think the way we looked at it and continue to look at it is we have all of our brands ought to be able to grow over some time frame, so otherwise, we shouldn't have them, including Vans. I think the most common question I've gotten as long as I've been here, by the way, I am wearing the shoes that Brent told me I shouldn't wear. Just to point that out, which I think are spectacular, but he does too, but he just doesn't think I should be wearing them, but so all of our brands are going to grow, and if you looked at the mix of our brands and the overall profitability and the scenario we believe will happen and a couple of alternative scenarios, we think overall we'll be just fine from a profitability standpoint. We'll deliver what we said.
Hi, Brooke Roach from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for all of the detail today. I was hoping that we could discuss a little bit about the costs to achieve some of these savings. Specifically in SG&A, some of the items that you laid out, like cutting contract labor and vendor spending, optimizing the store fleet, fixing distribution and logistics, appear to have some cost to get to that optimization. Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that specifically, and then also the biggest drivers within that SG&A improvement of 150 basis points and when we should expect to see some of those? Thank you.
Yeah, so I think what we said already is we'd spend sort of in total Reinvent spending about $135 million. We'd spend about another $50 million or so to accelerate some of those changes in the back half of the year with an eventual sort of exit cost of about $190 million-$210 million or so. I don't think we've given out anything more than that, but that's roughly kind of the best way to think about the costs to implement all of this.
Great. Matt Boss, J.P. Morgan.
Hey, Matt.
So Bracken or Paul, or maybe both, on the $500-$600 million of savings or efficiencies that you've laid out, I guess, could you separate what you've laid out today as offensive relative to maybe what you see as defensive or restructuring to a lower revenue base?
Boy, that's a hard one. We didn't anticipate that question.
Bracken always plays offense.
Yeah. I don't think it's definitely risk management. I hadn't thought about it quite that way, Matt, to be honest with you. I think if you look at what we're doing, we're trying to get the size of our SG&A back to the scale that it ought to be. So if you want to call it defensive, I think it is. But we're really building a P&L that's going to be super attractive going forward. That's the offensive part. So I guess I mostly think offense, but it definitely had to start with defense. How's that for a dodge?
Defense and championship. Yeah, no, I would agree. I think a lot of it is getting the right foundation so you can always play offense, right? We talked about financial flexibility with respect to our leverage, right? So getting the debt down and getting a better leverage ratio. Is that defensive? Well, yeah, we'd like to have a lower leverage ratio. But when you get there, you can play offense because you have such a higher degree of flexibility with what you can do moving forward. So I think it's the same thing with everything here. We're building an operating model that we believe when we return to growth will allow us to play significant offense.
Hey, guys. Simeon, BMO.
Hey, thank you.
Thank you for all this. Good to see you guys. So the question I want to ask is maybe building off of John's and saying, "This was incredibly helpful. Thank you," to build into the construct, the brand level, EBIT margins or segment. I don't think you're going to go there. So I'll throw that out in case you will. But if I can try a different way, you frame this in a very helpful way, giving us the different time periods, looking back when it was 13, when it was 10. How much of this is, or how are you approaching, as we think about this, looking back to getting maybe a little different than the way Matt said, pivot to where you were?
Like, is the P&L, how much of these savings are getting back to how you were operating in the past versus what's going to be new? And should we be looking at, in other words, a recapture so we can obviously see where the margins came down if we're building backwards, or are you just building an entirely new P&L?
We're building an entirely new P&L. That's the best way to think about it. Do you want to add?
No, 100%. The new P&L, new operating structure, just a whole new way of doing it.
You look at the projects that are totally new, the whole thing; this isn't how do we get back to what we used to do? Now, that said, this company operated so well for so long, and it operated so well for so long in a certain time frame with a certain collection of assets, and a lot of those assets we still have, and they're phenomenal, but I would say we're really angling towards a very different way of operating going forward that has several features that are very similar to the past. One is a skinny top. I don't like big overhead. Nobody likes big overhead. It's never been a popular thing with investors, and it's not effective. It doesn't work anywhere.
So really being thin at the top and pushing decision-making down, that's the part that when Wiseman was running the company, I think we really consistently did very well. And there are other players that I've talked to. I am a historian, so I really try to talk to some of the people from the past. And I think that's a feature that pushed the decision-making downward to have very good financial discipline and don't have a lot of people at the top.
We're on our last question from BNP Paribas. Thank you very much, Bracken, for today's presentation. I think Martino mentioned there's about $1.3 billion of sales coming from seven brands driving double-digit EBIT margins. Are there any key learnings from those brands? I mean, obviously, the leverage, they're smaller scale. You would think they would have lower margins that you can apply to the bigger brands. And I think when it comes to the store count, you have about 1,200 stores that you directly operate. You've cut about 100 stores from Vans. I know the conversation is not about Vans today, but how do we think about the store count over the next three, four years?
I'm going to let Martino answer the second one, and if you don't mind, I'll answer the first one, although you can add color to that. Yeah, I think the most powerful thing about small businesses is they're usually closer to their customers, and they usually listen well, and they are so fixated on products, and I think from that perspective, some of our emerging brands just do a fantastic job. I think Altra is a great example of that. They just really are close to customers and close to, you heard Martino say, we've got, instead of sales reps, we have technical reps. That's because the technical part of this matters to our customers, both the customers who sell us and the customers who buy us.
I think that part of all of our businesses, I really want us all to get back to feeling like small companies, small businesses, and being super close to customers and then just trying to solve their problems. You want to add the second one?
Yeah. Well, thanks, Lorraine. I think on the emerging brand side, back to maybe before with the spin-off of Jeans, where we had a total of 30-plus brands. So now I think our portfolio is really now much more, I think, focused, and I think the emerging brand session now, we can really manage it close. So that startup mindset, reactiveness, closeness to consumers, it's time for us now to be more probably with a stronger intent and more clear on how we really build from. The second part about the retail fleet, I think it's important in America because we have done that in a more effective way in Europe and in Asia. There are two components. One is really what are the stores that we really need to own and how do we constantly edit and amplify the fleet that we want to have.
And I think having a portfolio, it helps because sometimes you can also transfer stores from one brand to the other and constantly make your fleet best. The second component is really in the long run, as I mentioned, I'm really passionate for this integrated marketplace strategy where you give the proper relevance across and let consumers shop in their journey anywhere they want. So it's not about the ownership. It's about, I think, the experience and the execution that you want to provide to consumers in their journey. And I think in that sense, I really value that we have the two equal legs of wholesale strategic partners and on the other side, direct to consumers in all different formats.
So that's also important, the diversification of the fleet across the region, not only to a certain extent the number of stores because they can play very different roles with a bigger opportunity if they're well segmented.
Hey, guys. Ike Boruchow, Wells Fargo.
Hey, Ike.
Yeah. Thanks for all the help. It's good to hear the long-term guidepost. But I guess two for Paul. Clearly, you're guiding to debt deleverage and the balance sheet. Can I just ask specifically, I think after next year, you have roughly $500 million of notes a year from 2026, 2027, 2028. Are you planning to pay those down officially? And then just a follow-up question is I know we're not going to get into revenue relative to your plan, but I think you alluded to this in your prepared remarks, Paul. If there is revenue upside, can you talk to us about incrementals or how we would think about flow-through on whatever potential revenue there could be?
Yeah, let me take the second part first. Yeah. So what I said in the prepared comments was if we got 10% revenue growth, so if we added $1 billion of revenue, you could expect about 150-200 basis points of flow-through into the operating margin. If revenue was even faster than that, I'm not sure if you'd see as much because I think we'd probably reinvest even more into the business. But I think that gives you some idea of sort of the leverage on the upside if things were to go better than what was in the slides that I showed. In terms of leverage, I'm not going to commit to anything per se other than to say we are very committed to getting to two and a half times, and we'll do it at the appropriate time with the appropriate cash flow.
Hi, Dana Telsey.
Hey, Dana.
From Telsey. Hi. As you think about the gross margin and unpacking it through the presentations today, you had an increased focus on design and speed. How are you thinking of the contribution of AUR as a differentiator by brand or just overall contribution of AUR to the margins along with the opportunity for lead times and sourcing?
It's a little hard to break that one down when you're looking across 12 different brands and regions, etc. I would say overall, I am hopeful that you'll see us increase kind of our prices a little bit. Not a straight price increase, but as we launch new things, that they'll be more valuable. Now, do I have a specific thing I'm ready to point to? Not yet. But we'll get there. I think if we're doing a great job creating products, they should be more valuable. Now, it doesn't mean we're going to suddenly shift the gears and try to get everything to sell for $10 or $20 more. We're not. I think one of the things I love about this business is we really do serve everybody. We're not a luxury brand company. We don't want to be.
But we want some people who buy luxury products to be styling with some of our Vans and some of our North Face. But we're not a luxury brand company. You can afford us. I have a friend who says, "Hey, the new cool is high low." You got a Louis Vuitton purse and a pair of Vans I bought. That's cool. And so we really want to be that. So yeah, I think you will see probably over a very long period of time some improvement in the overall average pricing, but we'll see. And less promotion for sure.
I think we have time for one more question.
Oh, no.
Yep. Sorry.
Hey, thanks, guys. Paul Lejuez, Citi.
Hi, Paul.
Hey. Bracken, I think you've said several times that you've been hitting your internal targets for several quarters now. Within that, there's got to be some disappointment, some things that are going better. Can you talk about what's been your biggest disappointment thus far? And then what's that one thing that is just progressing way faster than you even hoped?
I mean, look, overall, we're kind of hitting the numbers we are. I've learned to kind of view a business as a smoothing process. You forecast total business. I've always had these multi-business complex businesses that I've run. So I don't usually get too caught up on when one's lagging and one's doing a little better because I found that they tend to equal out. I'm a heat-seeking missile. When I see a problem, I'm there, and so is Martino, and so is Brent, so is Paul. So I don't get too worried about it. I wouldn't point to an area. I'd go, "Wow, I'm so disappointed with that." It just doesn't seem to be coming along. If there are things, and there are, that aren't working yet, we're working on them right now. You hear the experiment, experiment, experiment comment from Martino in the retail level.
We're kind of the same way everywhere. So I'm not just dodging your question. I'm really not. I just don't really think that way. If there were something that really stood out as a dog, I'd probably tell you. And there's not. There really isn't. You can't open the hood and say, "Oh, wow, that's terrible, and that thing's offsetting it." We don't have that. At least not right now. Better? I think there are things that are popping better here and there around the company and that, but I expect that. So is that better your expectations? It can't be, right? So I expect things to get systematically better. That's why we're guiding the way we are. And they are. And I'd say they're generally getting better. There's some areas that I wish would go faster.
I don't want to mention them because it'll make people feel bad inside my company, and I should make them feel bad in person rather than on stage. I mean, there's some things that are going really fast. It's super impressed me, but I wouldn't point to individual numbers on that. I'd say it's more about what we're doing and how fast we're operating. I love speed. I don't like recklessness, but I love speed, and if things aren't going fast, it makes me kind of bummed out, and I really want them to move faster, and the good news is we've got a leadership team that are like, they're all, you can kind of feel it, they're all fast thinkers and fast movers, but not reckless.
All right. You have some closing thoughts?
I guess I'll close by saying this has been so much fun for me. It was, as usual, it was as much fun preparing for this as it was doing it. And I also want to thank, I want to thank Allegra and the whole IR team we have here and Paul and his team and all the presenters and all the people behind them because even though it looks like it wasn't that hard to put together, there's a lot of effort that goes into it. And I want to thank the brand presidents who literally we made stay home because they were all dying to be here. And we said, "If we get you in the room, you're going to get interviewed by everybody in the room." And so we're not going to do that. And then I finally want to thank you.
I think I've said this a few times in more one-on-one or one-on-few settings, but this is really sincere. I've learned so much from investors and analysts, including the research reports that you write and certainly the discussions we have. And it's funny. I think in a world where people talk about activist investors and what an impact they have on your thinking, and they have, actually, all the rest of the investors have an impact on your thinking too. I can tell by the questions you ask what's the statement behind it. Today, I could go through and write, "What's the comment you're really making in the statement you're asking?" So I've just learned so much as a public company CEO in the context of investors, and I feel so lucky.
This company in particular has such engagement from the investment community that it is really a learning lab from an investor standpoint. Now, on the inside, I'll close by saying we have created an All-Star team. I'm not going to hold back. We have created an All-Star team. I can't believe that we've been able to attract the people we have. Brent, thank you. Because it really took Brent on the phone in people's face at dinner every day to bring this group and the group you're going to see later to the field. The cool thing is A players don't only hire A players, they turn B players and sometimes C players into A players underneath them by growing them. That's what's next. Thanks a lot.
Can't wait to see all of you on investor calls and one-on-one meetings and things and small group meetings, but also in the next meeting we have, which I can't officially give the date because Allegra will kill me, but we are going to do it later in the year. You are going to get a real face-to-face with our brand presidents, and I think it's going to be super fun, so thanks a lot. Thanks for everybody. I'm sorry.
Thank you for attending VF's Fiscal 2025 Investor Day, Part One. Reinvent to grow. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Thank you, God. I also want to say I'm sorry that we didn't get to all the questions. That violates a rule of mine, which I love to get to every question. If we didn't get to them, we'll try to somehow get your question to us, somehow we'll answer it. Thank you.